


the wilderness is calling our names

by meritmut



Series: the blackest skies, the daunting stars [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Grey Rey, Sensory Weirdness, Telepathy, also she beats the crap out of him, angling for that grey endgame, in which the desert gave rey some perspective on the nature of broken things, the robo hand makes a cameo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-21 14:11:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7390378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>She's like waves the way she crashes into him, like the wind, like the rolling boom of thunderclouds in the burning land: it stirs something in him to answer—like reaching to like, the way it's always been. She calls to something inside him he'd never even known was there.</p>
  <p>(His death has always belonged to her.)</p>
</blockquote><p>A long-awaited confrontation, and—perhaps—a way out of the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the wilderness is calling our names

**Author's Note:**

> look outside, the wilderness / the wilderness is calling our names  
> the blackest skies, the daunting stars / the desert sun, melting our cold hearts
> 
> — iamx, 'look outside'

She breaks the surface of the trance and for a moment, there is only euphoria.

_I did it._

Then her body reasserts itself, a myriad of aches and pains blooming throughout her in protest of being left neglected for so many hours—she isn't sure _how_ many, exactly, only that she's shaking with cold and hunger and her feet are completely numb, and even the blanket that's appeared about her shoulders is damp through, but the Force is trilling through her, theremin-sweet, ocean-song, and in her sweat-slipping palms sits the fruit of her long labour.

Her fingers curl possessively about it: the hilt, long and slender like the staff she carried for years (made from it, in parts), as rough around the edges as its maker. It sits in her grip more comfortably than the blue Skywalker saber and when she lifts it to test the balance Rey thinks it a weapon with which she might yet hold her own.

(She thinks, _yes: mine.)_

Its twin blades are the colour of all that is good in her mind—dustmotes glinting in light, the sun dancing on the surface of the waters of Lake Nymeve and the sea-glass that comes ashore along the beaches of their island, carried from volcanic chasms deep below the water and worn smooth by the aeons and the tide. There are so _many_  colours in her world now, so many Rey is only just learning names for, and she doesn't know this one yet but it's a shade that she has come to associate with the hard core of light within her, that untouchable seat of strength that burns as hot and silver-bright as the hulls of the Graveyard at high noon.

A fitting opponent, she decides, to the other, the red terror that burns still in the back of her mind like the scarlet light of the dying planet, leeching out in arterial streams across the snow.

 

 

i.

 

This time it is the two of them, it is the moon-limned slopes of the dunes underfoot and the great endless vault of the star-scattered sky above and the reassuring solidity of her saber at her back, and yet as Rey feels the cool of the night settle into her skin with something like familiarity she feels too the stirring of an old apprehension, an old _fear,_  as she looks out across the sands to where he waits, a focussed fighter whose eyes show nothing of the wildness she remembers, and knows with the surety of the Force-ordained that whatever happens—whichever of them prevails this time—it will all be over come the dawn. Their fates will be decided at last.

 _Good,_ she thinks. _Good, I am so tired of running._

 

–

 

She moves over the sand with the loping stride of one raised to it, palming her lightsaber as she draws near. Soon she is close enough that he can see her eyes: how they track ceaselessly over him, how they gleam in the darkness.

(Raptor eyes, he always thought, except for when they weren't, except for when she dropped the mask and bared the teeth of the winter wolf beneath. Thing of nightmares under all that gold.)

Her mind moves over his, like reaching to like in an involuntary reflex she is all too swift to suppress, but after thirteen hundred days parted by the buffer of as many systems as she could put between them these last insignificant feet are too few and too many all at once. She is _right here,_ in the flesh at long last, and he struggles to put words to the feeling of it.

It's the first breath planetside after months in cold space; the heart-stopping lurch of the hyperdrive kicking in; the distant smudge on the horizon that promises long-awaited rainfall in the desert.

(He's never seen rain in the desert. He hates it, hates the heat and the smell and the _dust_ and so it shouldn't be his to remember—but then so little of him is, anymore. So much of him, more than was ever truly  _his_ to begin with, belongs to her, the places where the void blows cold inside him filled up by thoughts and memories no more his own than the feeling of sea-wind through his hair, wet stone scraping under his skin or the grit of sand under his nails, a Force signature that is hale and fierce and so far from the blackened thing that hangs about him like the tatters of a cape. Fragments of a life that is not his, never has been and never could be, slipping through the cracks between his self and that of the weary-eyed creature currently glowering at him from across the sands.)

The bond that lies loose between them is an uneven thing, a string between two living pegs that sings like plucked sinew with their nearness, stoppered tight in places and in others only veiled in deference to their mutual desire for a moment's peace. They’d torture each other with it at first, that strange and unwelcome connection: haunt and hunt by turns until there was no silence, no _dream_ to which Kylo could run without the grey wolf snapping at his heels, no sunlit space she could cleave to where his ghoulish shadow couldn’t find her. He could feel her going mad with it and it hadn’t been good, to feel that, he had begun to hate her mind more than she hated having him there and so—

—and so: a truce.

Not a natural thing, to do what they have done, but better than madness. Better than losing themselves piece by piece as they bleed together over the bond, even if it goes against the Force itself to strangle what it put between them.

 _Show me, tell me how_ —how it had choked his throat with bitter laughter to hear her plea because that was his curse, wasn't it? The inevitable corruption of everything he'd ever hoped for; the mocking echo of his own words in his ears.  _I can show you,_ he'd said, as the world fell down around them and yet all he could see was her eyes. _I can show you everything, I can make you unstoppable—_

How he’d _begged_ to teach her, to be allowed that privilege, and in the end the only thing she lets him guide her in is how to shape her formidable mind to shut him out.

He does it anyway, and it’s quiet without her, and that’s almost worse.

 

ii.

 

On with the bloodletting. Their sabers meet in a crackling hiss of violet-white, meet and meet again and neither of them gain or give ground as the Force whips up a storm around their bodies, blurring away the rest of the world into a blueish haze of dunes and velvet night. There are close calls—Kylo observes her mouth twisting when he catches her elbow, watches it curve up in fleeting triumph when she manages to scythe away a chunk of his hair—but they’re testing one another, checking each other’s progress, searching for weaknesses to pull at like loose threads until his strength or hers comes apart.

Even after all this time, she stuns him a little. She fights like nothing and no one he’s ever seen, wild and furious and barely contained by the dusty-gold translucence of her skin: she is everything of the storm before it meets the land, the wide open eye of the desert sky, the raw untempered stuff that suns are made of.

He remembers _Starkiller_ , that accursed frozen rock, and how it died in fire in her wake.

 

–

 

She moves and the light dances.

How is it she can still be so bright, Kylo wonders as she pushes against him, the meteoric flash of her saber enough to drive him back a stride and then another until she's gaining ground in earnest and _oh,_ how he's _missed_ this! She's like waves the way she crashes into him, like the wind, like the rolling boom of thunderclouds in the burning land: he can feel the thrill that lances through her to be back here and it stirs something in him to answer—like reaching to like, the way it's always been. She calls to something inside him he'd never even known was there.

He feels it too when she claws the upper hand away from him and the bond hums electric with equal parts relief and triumph and fraying, savage hope.

 _So_ bright, all boldness and surefooted strength, she is a bonfire in the Force and it feels as though the exposed parts of his consciousness have begun to blacken and burn where the damned bond presses it against her own, as if she were no longer a conduit for its energy but a _source._  Blistering, merciless, undiminished by exhaustion and the slow gathering of darkness at her heart.

The darkness, which made a slave and a ruin of him but doesn't touch Rey in the same way at all: doesn't scorch the earth where it takes root, but becomes instead something new. Something different, formed of its entangling with the light, a skein of silver-grey star matter woven through and through the fabric of the universe into a force Kylo cannot name, cannot escape, cannot unravel without burning his hands to the bone.

Bond or no, there was no distance he could put between them that might be enough to escape the irradiating reach of her, no corner of the galaxy she could not chase him if she chose.

(Fortunate, he supposes, that it's taken her so long to do it.)

 

–

 

The dark roars through his veins. It feels different when Rey is near, her every movement seeming weighted with destiny as she pushes them so resolutely towards the brink, as though it knows what Kylo still refuses to admit to himself—that his heart is no longer in this. That it hasn't been for a long time.

He finds the root of fury and hurt within him anyway and grips it tight.

He brings his saber up between them but trying to block her at this closeness is like trying to cut away the Force itself, even the inferno of his blade is thrown into silhouette by the imprint of her on his eyelids—light eclipsed by light, he thinks he could die like this.

He thinks he would welcome it.

There's finality in every line of her, like she already knows this is the end. Like she's only just catching on to what had driven him here in the first place.

 _Back to this, are we, Jedi?_  he teases, though she's never claimed the title for herself; Skywalker had learnt his lesson by the time she tracked him down. It wouldn't have fit her anyway. It's never been more apparent than here, now, with all their shadows laid bare to one another, that Rey is too vast for it—there's too much inside her, pain and grief and longing and hope, the mantle of the Jedi couldn’t contain her any more than it could the boy he'd used to be so why is it only _him_  that’s burning now— _I saw it, you know, long ago, before ever we met. It came to me in dreams that you would be there at my end._

The sand gives way beneath them and Rey stumbles, alarm sharp in her eyes as she fends off the crushing blow aimed for her neck.

 _I thought it would be then—in the forest—but you spared me,_  Kylo snarls the last out, forcing her back another step.  _You let me_ live.

Live, and endure the bloody aftermath of his failure.

It might be the cruellest thing she's ever done.

 

iii.

 

A recollection:

There is a wolf in his dreams but it’s not until they meet in the flesh that he glimpses its true form. Before that there are only impressions, flickers of amber eyes and hunching, powerful shoulders, bared teeth and light—always the light, unspooling from unseen hands like thread to wind about his throat and choke the life from him.

It is a unique kind of anxiety, an itching paranoia his master sees fit to nurture with the greatest care until it bears fruit and blossoms into a ripe terror that will, he is assured, he is _promised,_ keep him vigilant and safe in the years ahead.

But things do not go to plan, and by the time she comes for him through the snow with his own birthright ablaze in her fists and fury scorching a path through her veins Kylo is all but ready to feel the wolf's jaws snap closed.

Instead he can do nothing but watch as she has the temerity to _leave him there,_ the heat of her melting away into the unnatural night until his own seared flesh is the last warm thing left in the world and the dawning understanding that he has come up against his destiny and _survived_ is enough to put him on his back all over again.

Taunted for so long by dreams of her coming, the usurper with the song of the desert under her skin and no mercy in her heart for one like him, only for her to turn and run before the job is done.

He’ll tell himself later that it is only his pride that makes him hate, stung to have feared for nothing all these years, and not because it feels like betrayal.

 

–

 

"No," she bit back the first time he accused her of it, years ago now. She was all hot eyes and gritted teeth when she snapped _the earth broke, I couldn’t finish you,_  and Kylo had spent enough time contemplating the wherefores of his survival to know the lie for what it was but Rey had driven him back apace and he'd let her have it. Let her close her eyes to the truth, though they’d both felt the push of the darkness against her mind that day on _Starkiller_. He remembers how it called to her, pleading sweetly for his blood, remembers too the way she’d flung it from her with both hands like something burning.

 _You were a let-down, in the end,_  he continues, here in the cold desert night of the present, because if he can't goad her with her own cruelty then surely he will find a nerve to pluck in her pride, _I’d expected better._

 _(Hoped for more,_ he does not add, like she isn’t close enough to know it already.)

Rey’s mouth moves in something that might—if he didn’t know her better—be called a smirk. "Happy to disappoint," she tells him, only _happy_ is never something she is around him, even he can't mistake contempt for amusement, _but we’re not done yet._

Dimly, he recalls that she used to fear him too.

(Recalls that he’d _relished_ it—her terror, fed on it like the beast he was, the beast she’d known him to be from that first instant in the greenwood. He’s felt less and less a man ever since that day but it’s been a long time since Rey was ever afraid of him.)

Her gaze is steady and strong and perhaps it's only the work of time; only the slow erosion through the years of that whispered fable that Knights are something more than men and less than stories, as layer by layer she pares him to the bone and finds each measure of his fragmented self more pitiable, more wanting than the one before.

_Whence came you by those sharp teeth, little one?_

 

iv.

 

There are more pieces of him missing than before. When she feels for him in the Force she can feel the hollow spaces of him, all the things that should be there and aren’t. Anger, impatience, resentment, they'll fight to the death to keep him but the old recklessness she remembers is missing: he feels wrong, out of balance, his Force signature limping like an old fracture never mended right.

(Snoke's dog, they call him in her neck of the stars, but he's more wolf than hound these days, closer than ever to snapping his leash for good.)

He's still at war with himself, the faint pulse of a stress headache she hasn't felt in years is clear enough sign of _that,_ and it's a strange thing to stand on the outside of—discipline and fury tugging him one way and then the other, a feverish contradiction she's never fully understood. Something to do with pain, she thinks, an iron will born of suffering for suffering’s sake, discipline forged in agony rather than hardship and need and the sure knowledge that if she let herself slacken she wouldn’t last the week.

There was no malice in the things done to her, beyond the base and capricious greed of the junkbosses. No higher power bearing down and saying _this pain has meaning, these are the agonies you must bear._

There were times when she'd tried to convince herself that, at the lowest ebb of hope, but it sat sour in her mind and ended up discarded with all her other half-hearted contemplations of faith, falling somewhere between _if it means you are alive when they come then it will be worth it in the end_ and _gods are all bastards, every last one of them, keep your head down and maybe they won't look your way._

Ren’s higher power has its own designs, but recalling the pain that seared through the bond before she learnt to shut it out Rey wonders what else he has endured in the past years to chase even the old insensate terror from his eyes.

Then he’s on her again, and there’s no room for wonder, no room for any thought at all.

 

–

 

The cord twists, loops back in upon itself until they grapple in an echo of that first dazed bout and she can't help but stagger beneath the tower of him: his fingers like cuffs about her wrist, she can feel the tendons in his forearm give beneath her own grip and bites back a curse, wishing for a wound somewhere, anywhere, that she might find with her elbow or her knee and claw back the upper hand.

His eyes are hot with something like victory. _Bend,_ he implores, _bend before you break._

"Shut it,” she grits out through clenched teeth.

Her muscles are on fire, limbs screaming in protest as she struggles to keep herself upright on the liquid-soft sands and when he picks up on her fatigue (because of course he does, with only a breath between their heaving bodies he picks up on _everything)_ she feels the desperate triumph radiating from him abruptly turn to hope.

 _You’re wasted on the light,_ his mind is hoarse against hers as he presses his advantage, scrabbling for purchase on the walls Rey throws up as effortlessly as she breathes in the face of his leaning strength.

The fingers that flex about her wrist are warm, she realises suddenly. He grips his saber in his other hand—the right, which hasn't been flesh and bone since she parted it from the rest of him four years ago. _There’s such will in you, such strength. Such yearning. D’you even know what it is you long for, anymore?_

 _Heard this speech before,_ she fills her thoughts with as much scorn as she can, the closest she tends to come to humour when he's near (except for the time on Nar Shaddaa when she managed to trip him, actually _trip him,_  and it pulled a snort of laughter from her that shocked them both _._  He let her live, that day, but she's never let him live it down). _Never worked then, it's not working now. Not got anything new to say?_

 _There is so much I could teach you, still,_ his voice is urgent and faltering in her mind and does _he_ even believe half the things he says anymore? _Y _ou could be so much_ more _.__

 _And nothing in it for you,_  she straightens her spine, firms her grip on her weapon and his arm both, tilting back to put space between herself and that wild stare—

_We can finish this together—Rey—_

She anchors her feet in the sand, lets his weight bear her back a little further, and—

 

–

 

"What if I can’t keep him out?" she asks Luke, because there is something about this island and this man that loosens her tongue and has her spilling her fears as though she’d never learnt to hold them closer to her chest than ration packs and water both, and, stars, she's _tired_ _—_  "what if I can’t fight him on two fronts?"

He tucks his hands into his sleeves, his gaze thoughtful and resigned. "Then you should learn to deceive. To feint and to mask what you can’t outright hide."

She nods, leaning toward him, hoping her eagerness will hide her desperation.

"Teach me."

 

–

–

 

_"—I can feel the hunger in you. The want for more than this."_

_"Good,"_  says Rey savagely, as she surges up and drives her forehead into his nose.

 

–

–

 

 _Just a scavenger,_ he says the day they meet; _scavenger, sandrat,_ unwanted orphan of the scorched plains, rough-nailed foundling who cut her teeth on the broken glass of the Crackle and laid to rest her own girlhood out between the red dirt and the light, made herself small in the bones of dead starcraft, clawing rest from the howling winds of the frozen Jakku night.  _Steelpecker, Badlands-born,_ she’d pick a fight with the sun itself to defend her own.

Even the desert couldn’t burn that out of her. It’s laughable that he thinks he could.

 _(Just a scavenger,_ he says, but also, _it is you.)_

 

v.

 

The flesh-and-bone grip on her wrist slackens and she acts on a thought, tearing her hand free of his and thumbing off her saber to bring its hilt slamming up into the ridge of bone behind his temple, hard enough to fell a less stubborn man on the spot—not hard enough to kill, not that she isn't tempted, but he sways as though the backbone has gone out of him and she’s left to regain her balance as he slumps to his knees in the sand.

It’s not an easy thing to do, not with their being half in each other’s heads even before she smashed their skulls together, the blow reverberates between them and an ache blooms sweet and sharp behind Rey’s eyes and her own face dances across her vision like sunspots, but she blinks and there he is again, blood-slicked chin to show for it and a distinct lack of focus in his eyes. The saber slips from his cybernetic hand and she calls it to her quickly, snuffing out its livid light and simply letting it hang loose at her side, unthreatening.

Her own blade ignites, moves to hover near his throat.

 _(The wolf flexes its claws in the snow, transfixes him with the shift of muscle and bone under grey-dun fur, a red tongue lolling from a redder mouth and oh,_ this _is the destiny he was meant for, surely—)_

She sucks down a breath and swallows her spit and gives them both a scattered few heartbeats to piece together something like equilibrium, two souls stuck in endless feedback loop between their bodies can barely recall what it’s like to see straight but she’s stubborn, does it anyway and pushes back along the bond the darkness that emboldens her, that runs like a storm in her blood and corrodes her wavering conviction to not _kill you, give me a reason why I shouldn’t, I swear—_

He won't, because it’s what he wants, which is in itself a good enough reason to deny him.

Not _good_ , but good enough: to refuse him this last wish because she owes him nothing and yet Kylo wants more than almost  _anything_  to die by her hand. Any hand would do, but hers carries the weight of fate and it's been a long time since he stopped pretending the ground at her feet isn't the closest thing to a sacred place he knows.

It's different. Unfamiliar. They've always flinched back from death in the past. It became like a game, almost, of seeing how close they could push each other to the edge before the bite of bloodlust dulled, before a survival instinct too fundamental to their natures to be ignored could stay their hands.

To feel Kylo longing for that end, now, for her to take him to that brink and shove him off for good, to finish this the only way he sees possible, shakes her.

 _What happened to you,_ she wants to ask.  _What changed?_  

But—she feels the knife's edge beneath her feet, and doesn't dare. Not when one misstep could shatter everything. Not when he's looking up at her like _that_  and offering—

—and offering just that. _Everything_.

He doesn't know how to give less than every bloodied inch of him, touch-starved and wheedling for grace, for death, for _purpose:_  she only did half the job when she tore his face and took his hand and he would give up the rest to her without hesitating if only she would _ask—Rey, you have only to ask, only to reach out and_ take _it_. The eagerness in his stare pulses straight to her gut and it moves her in strange ways to have him here, broken at her feet, whispers dark nothings to the hungry girl inside her, but it’s not bloodlust that grips her now.

It's unease, unease and horror and knowing _this is too close_ _._

She repeats it more firmly to herself as the saber trembles in her grip. There's nothing he could offer that she might consider taking, not even his life—wretched, bloodstained mess, some things even steelpeckers won’t touch.

That there's some petty satisfaction to be had in denying him his wish has nothing to do with it.

 

-

 

 _Hunger?_  Rey echoes scornfully. _Hunger_ _raised me._

She lets fall her shields, opens up to him the muscle that beats small and red and bloody beneath her breastbone: the place she keeps the ghosts of the life she lived before this one, the life left to rust with all the other unwanted things given over to the sands. She carries the wasteland with her still, cracked earth and gasping thirst and a burning sky stretching on and on into the heat-smeared edges of eternity, dark dunes beneath a blazing vault of night and the gold Jakku star that baked her flesh like clay into something hard and dark that cannot now be broken; the long years, scratched into the walls of her home, her cell, her refuge, that small untouchable place of faith and fury inside her that no crawling Knight of Ren will ever touch.

_Hunger was my mother, my father, my first and best teacher._

Kylo is caught by the way her skin tightens over the knuckles wrapped about her staff, the way the muscles in her arms tense and shift and a thrill travels the length and breadth of him to see the wild thing in her rise so close to the surface. It moves under her skin, moonlight and the wolf gleaming in her narrowed eyes and he’s wanted this for _so long_ —to see her unleashed, to dig his nails under her brittle walls and pry them apart to find the fury and frustration and fierceness at her heart, to exult in the way the bond shivers with her agitation because it means _relief:_ means the vindication of his faith that so much of her is like so much of him, and his own frustration that she would never, ever accept it.

The tendons in her neck stand out with the pressure of her clenched teeth and he can feel the echo of it in his own jaw like a phantom ache, she isn't the first he’s skinned alive to satiate the howling thing inside him but he looks into the bond now, the cracked-open thing that tethers his soul to hers and it takes everything not to flinch back from it—from the wilderness of griefs at her foundations, the stubborn knot of unmet hopes and forgotten longings and _hurt,_ gnawing and cold, a raw and nameless pain that’d come to take on a life of its own in the hollow below her heart.

(This is why she put half a galaxy between them: this is why he let her do it.)

 _It was hunger woke me before dawn and tucked me in at night, taught me to hunt and to fight and to keep fighting. I fed on the wanting, Kylo Ren, it_ made _me. But I mastered it,_ her mouth curls in a sneer but just like that the fire is gone from her, bitter resignation like ash gone cold left in its place. _Before it could master me._

She never wanted this fight. She was tired of it years ago. She's exhausted now, wearied beyond words with a war that never seems to end, only ever to pause while the two of them catch their breath and lick their wounds and seek out new ways to fail to kill each other.

 _And you think you know what it is, to die by inches and go on living anyway?_ The scathing edge of her disdain is perhaps the least of what he’s earned.

 _Maybe you do._ She’s sensed that of him, felt far too closely the war of attrition that rages still for his soul. She knows the torment that inhabits him, the long unmaking of everything Ben Solo was, how he has tried time and again to cut his heart out rather than suffer to feel it starve.

His end of the bond has been a wasteland of its own kind these past years.

She knows how it feels, to want to burn out feeling at the root.

(It shakes her, still, to see inside him and find something of herself reflected there.)

 

vi.

 

The sand is soft and night-cool beneath his shins, slides between the seams of his clothes and if he survives this day he’ll be digging it out of his own hide for weeks. There are grains sweat-stuck to Rey’s skin where their scuffling kicked it up, freckling her cheeks like nebulae.

She has freckles already, he knows, spotted them that first day and never knew what to do with the detail.

He'd forgotten how tall she is, though, how such a slight thing can be a tower too. From his knees Kylo must look up to meet her eyes and some small traitorous part of him goes calm with the rightness of it, the _correctness_ of him, here, bent before the seat of the only faith left to him.

That faith is what led him here, what keeps him here—the faith that it was always going to come down to this. The both of them, him and her, here on some forgotten rock at the end of everything where they could be the last two people in the galaxy. It doesn’t matter that she’s let him live before, or he her.

His death has always belonged to her. The rest of him is an afterthought.

(The rest of him is alive for the first time in decades.)

Somewhere an ancient power on a dark throne is stirring, but there is only the rush of the cold desert wind in Kylo’s ears.

 _Do it,_ his gaze comes to rest more or less steadily on her face, her eyes touched with darkness and the stars, _you want to. I can feel it._

Rey’s hand falters.

 

–

 

_Don’t be afraid. I feel it too._

 

–

 

A memory: a ship ascends into the cloudless sky over Niima Outpost. Not the first, and by no means the last that she’ll watch burn atmo with an ache in her chest and a howl catching in her throat, but the better part of a year’s work vanishing before her eyes and she can still remember the split helpless second where she thought the despair must drown her, that if she were at all human she ought to tear her hair and wail until she broke herself to pieces against the hard-packed ground.

Sooner or later, sealing away the pain becomes the only way to stay human at all.

 

–

 

“No…” she breathes, “no.”

His mouth stretches in a bloody smile.

 _Does it help you, to think that,_ he wonders? _Do you sleep better at night for telling yourself that you are nothing like me?_

 

–

 

“Think of it this way,” Poe’s voice is gentle in her memory, touched with kindness after she snaps at him, anger and nerves and not enough sleep boiling over and she bites out _it’s not the same, I’m not like him_ and, softer, _I don’t want to be like him,_ and he understands because he’s _Poe,_ isn’t he, his heart is a green thing in perpetual bloom— “we’ve all taken some knocks,” he says, “comes with the work, and sometimes you just gotta grit your teeth and use it, it’s not a bad thing—doesn’t make you bad either, and it doesn’t make you like him. You’re not like him, kid, any more than I am.”

“Not even a little bit,” Finn’s voice is firmer, and she can half-see the look he sends Poe over her head as his hand spreads warm over her spine.

“No, not even a little bit,” she knows now that isn't true but at the time she let it comfort her anyway, wrapping it round herself like wings, “you and Finn, you’ve as much reason as anyone to be angry, no one would blame you for it. Sometimes you gotta get angry if it means you can get back up again, but it doesn't make you— _dark_. Just makes you alive.”

 

–

 

_You’re a monster._

 

–

 

_(I feel it too.)_

 

vii.

 

She wants to say to him, _you can't go on like this_. This is the crux of the matter: this is her mission, though no one gave it to her, but if the universe will insist on bludgeoning them with its lofty designs then Rey will dig some good from the wreck if it kills her. It is a new galaxy they are building, so she hears, and this is the cornerstone.

Under her heels, the sand shifts.

It just might kill her anyway.

The desert is a place of flux. Nothing lasts—even in the Graveyard, where it seemed that the great wrecks would lie forever as monuments to the Empire's end, the passage of the years saw those fallen giants whittled down to the marrow, gnawed thin to make meals for carrion-eaters like her. Piece by piece they made their way into patch jobs and crude repairs, kept stomachs full and hands busy. Some must have even made it off-world. Rey had liked to think that, anyway.

It is the way of all things to die and to come new again: sometimes it is simply too gradual, too incremental for the naked eye to see.

(Until, one day, you look up, and the boneyard is made smooth and new, and green things are crawling through the cracks, and what mattered once no longer does, and life goes barrelling breathlessly on.)

Perhaps he does deserve to die.

"You want to," he repeats like he’s trying to convince her of it, and Rey shakes her head helplessly.

Perhaps it no longer matters.

“I did.” The rage sloughs from her like a toxin sweated out through the skin, leaving her tired and shaky and achingly aware of the sound of her own heartbeat. “No—I do. I want this over with, but don’t you get it?”

Kylo tilts his head to look at her, the faintest crease appearing between his dark brows. He doesn’t see.

“Keep trying to tell you, it’s not about want.”

 _Or—not about what_ I _want, anyway._

 

–

 

Luke once said she could keep the universe safe in this heart of hers, and sometimes it feels true, that there is no end to the sea of griefs and furies she contains and it’s not _fair_ being made into this thing which feels too deeply and too desperately to bear, no wonder so many Force-touched lose their minds, but even at her wildest state there is clarity enough to recognise the precipice to a place from which there would be no easy return.

(For all the ways they are alike, that Rey can see that point before it’s already passed is just one of the many ways they aren’t.)

 

–

 

“And even if it were,” she tells him honestly, how can you lie when someone is in your head (you can’t, oh, you can’t, not even to yourselves, not that they haven’t tried over the years), “I don't want it enough.”

And even if it were—and even if she did—when it comes to self-denial she’s got even him beat.

Kylo sinks further into himself at that, as if without the promise of a fight or a swift end there’s nothing left to hold him up and she’s seen beasts defanged before, and that’s not what this is. His bloody claws hang from her fingertips, she could tear out his teeth now if she wanted and he wouldn’t fight back. Wouldn’t even try, she can feel it like she can feel the sand sticking to her sweat-slick calves, a conviction lodged deep beneath her skin that she couldn’t explain if she tried.

There’s no telling how long this fragile moment will last but one thing Rey is more than aware of: what comes next, _whatever_  comes next, the path they take now will decide.

Closing her eyes, she's almost blinded by the currents of the Force surging about the two of them. She can feel him there still, looking up at her from his knees in a mockery of supplication and her half-bent towards him as though in answer, their bodies wreathed in an indistinct corona of light and darkness and it’s there, at the heart of it, where something else—something new—takes shape.

Beautiful, she thinks dumbly, watching the colours shift around them like aurora.

Here, too, she finds the way ahead.

 

–

 

Rey of Jakku, abandoned, orphan, motherless child of the wind and the rust-coloured sky, look at her now—touched by the Force, all the universe pouring through her, beloved of more real and beating hearts than she can count on her fingers, at home wherever her ship alights beneath the spreading skies. She carried her own bones into the desert, five thousand days of fire, and what was left is what could not be burned away.

What’s one man, half a ruin, to that?

 

viii.

 

She lifts her saber from his neck and lets it fall to her side so that its sea-light flickers over his face, clipping his own onto her belt to give her a hand free. With it, she makes an old trader sign: the open palm. It's no language he knows but even he can comprehend it as a gesture of peace.

She spreads her fingers, the offer she makes passing between them on a thought.

No certainties—gods, she hasn’t the power to give him those, hasn’t even the power to take them for herself—but, a chance. Possibility, real and true.

A choice.

She pushes into the bond the feeling of when she’d first unearthed the shuttle from the desert, of breaking free of Jakku’s atmosphere in the _Falcon_ and the split second of _freedom-flight-away-FREE_ that’d rushed through her before she remembered why it couldn’t last, the way her heart had soared to see whole lush _worlds_ of green, she fills him with it and everything of hope that she can.

“Why?”  _You aren’t suggesting I deserve it._

His voice is quieter than she’s ever heard it, edged with disbelief and she isn’t sure herself that she means any of this. He’s had chances before. She can’t say why this time should be different.

There is a turn of phrase she remembers from the desert, a wry thing, from the carrion-slang of those who live and work by the wasteland’s grace. _A k_ _indness_. A shared joke, or near enough, because it means mercy: it means a quick death, which _can_ be a kindness, after all, and a lightsaber is cleaner than a staff's blunt edge. It would be the kinder thing to finish him now, and once Rey might not have hesitated.

Or, perhaps, she might have seen something worth salvaging in the wreck before her.

“Not suggesting anything,” she replies shortly, _don’t think forgiveness works that way, anyway,_ not that either of them would know, he holds grudges like a dog with a bone and she’s never known who it was that wronged her worst. She hates the way her words feel in her mouth, stilted, fumbling: she’s always had a knack for languages but in parts and pieces, scraps picked up wherever she goes. She wishes she were cleverer, had Finn or Leia’s gift for spoken grace.

Leia, who wants her son back.

As reasons to spare him go, it’s not the worst.

(It’s a marked improvement on spite.)

_But, I'm tired._

Tugging on the Force to guide her, Rey settles for something closer to simplicity.

_So're you. And what comes now—that’s a choice to be made._

He exhales heavily, shoulders sagging further.

_Yours?_

Rey starts.

“No. Not for all the stars in the sky. Wouldn’t want it to be.”

(It's not enough, that there is light in him, not enough that some small place of goodness refuses to die. You can't save what doesn't _want_ to be saved.)

Kylo's gaze tracks upward, finds hers, it’s like looking into her own reflection in still water and she hates it. _I don’t want it either,_ he insists, he means the pain but also the hope, _I don’t want any of it, take it from me, take it please pleasetakeit—_

 _“Stop,”_ she says and thinks and he does. He goes still and quiet and looks up at her with something like wonder, fear and longing in his dark eyes but it’s not for the blood that beats in her throat or the power that surges beneath her skin. Or rather, it is, but it's for more than that, like he sees something else in her. He looks at her like she’s the stars and she hung them too, like she wove the whole galaxy out of the silver-grey thread that bands from her soul to his. Rey realises with a start that it's the same way he would regard her through the bond in those rare moments she left it open; like she confounds him, fascinates, terrifies, _enraptures_ him; like he truly could die this way; like he doesn't want to consume so much as _be consumed_ but if that's true then why is it _her_ that’s drowning now—

“Rey,” he cracks out, and now it’s him pulling her back to shore.

 _Oh,_ Rey thinks.

Her hands are shaking.

 

–

 

(A memory: a hand, warm and rough in hers when there had been no time for words, only running, only the dizzying exhilaration pushing up through her chest as she and the young man in the borrowed coat raced for their lives and she felt for the first time the breathless echo of another’s heart beating in time with her own, the strength in the fingers that gripped hers, the warmth of touch where words failed to remind them both that there are softer things made by hands than fists and sometimes hope is no more than realising you can choose differently, and that you will not be alone if you do.)

 

–

 

A correction: one certainty.

Dawn is come.

The sun is rising and both of them still breathe, and if something has died tonight then neither of them will mourn it.

There is a whole wide universe out there, glittering in the line of the horizon.

 

–

 

Rey looks at Kylo, forlorn thing crouched in the sand with the glow of her saber and the first greyish murk of morning throwing a wan light across his ruined face, and she thinks she is too small, too afraid, to be entrusted with things so important.

She thinks of Finn, seizing hope with both hands, making himself anew in its image; the endless courage of his heart, the way he carries compassion in every step, gathers love to him like moons. She thinks of the good he brings to every life he touches since he renounced the only one he’d ever known.

He was afraid, and he came back anyway, dove into his own worst nightmare to find her. This is—nothing, to that.

This is just what scavengers do.

Reaching out again to touch him lightly on the temple, she lets fall the last of her shields, breaks down the final impediment to their long-suffering connection.

It has been a wound between them for so long, this link, and the walls they’ve built to keep the other out have managed only to bungle its healing, but the bond tears open at last and the Force _sings_ like the feeling rushing back into blood-starved tissues and there’s a ringing in his ears like the clear jubilant tumult of bells and Kylo can see, suddenly, the future Rey holds in her mind.

The other future, the one she never spoke of—never dared to believe until now, though she's watched it slowly crystallising for some time. She thinks it must have been waiting for this: the crucial moment upon which its fruition hinges, because it shimmers with a startling clarity when she pushes it through the bond towards him.

(Clarity, and something like promise, a tentative reward for the dim but hardy faith she has kept alight all this time, held in trust for a day like today.)

A gift of the Force—or perhaps what was intended all along.

Her mind presses and Kylo stiffens but there’s no resistance, nothing to stop her reaching in and _taking_ the way he once tried to—nothing but doing better and being gentler and she’s not good at it, has no practice at being _soft_ (careful, yes, the care one must take in picking apart delicate circuitry, in untangling wires and guiding a ship’s steering just so, in navigating the rotting innards of the Giants skilfully enough to  _not die_ in the process) but between the two of them she is not the blunt instrument and her touch can be gentle if she tries.

She's always had a knack for precision work.

She can feel him quaking, the axis of the universe shifting palpably beneath him and the movement of her roughened fingertips at his hairline is an anchor and benediction all in one: it's a gentler unmaking than any he has known but it is an unmaking nonetheless and as Kylo comes undone at the seams she doesn’t think he could fight it if he wanted to.

It startles her, still, when he goes slack against the earth—when he gives in to it. To _her_. The man is on his knees before her but still she'd half-anticipated a fight for the last of him. Her fingertips skate over his cheekbone as her hand falls back to her side, the other curling tight about her saber's grooved hilt.

A whispered plea, carried on the thread of a thought from him to her; an acquiescence. A surrender.

A voiceless confirmation of _yours_.

Rey huffs out a breath.

“Alright, then,” she says.

The grey morning covers them.


End file.
